Section:
Application Domains

Systems Biology and Translational medicine

Biological and clinical researches have dramatically changed because
of the technological advances, leading to the possibility of
measuring much more biological quantities than previously. Clinical
research studies can include now traditional measurements such as
clinical status, but also thousands of cell populations, peptides,
gene expressions for a given patient. This has facilitated the
transfer of knowledge from basic to clinical science (from "bench
side to bedside") and vice versa, a process often called
"Translational medicine". However, the analysis of these large
amounts of data needs specific methods, especially when one wants to
have a global understanding of the information inherent to complex
systems through an "integrative analysis". These systems like the
immune system are complex because of many interactions within and
between many levels (inside cells, between cells, in different
tissues, in various species). This has led to a new field called
"Systems biology" rapidly adapted to specific topics such as
"Systems Immunology" [55], "Systems vaccinology"
[52], "Systems medicine" [44]. From the
statistician point of view, two main challenges appear: i) to deal
with the massive amount of data ii) to find relevant models
capturing observed behaviors.